The 1970 New York Film Festival – then only in its eighth year – looked to be a very promising affair. As the New York Times reported with enthusiasm on September 4, the event would feature “new films directed by Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel . . . Bernardo Bertolucci, Alain Resnais, Kenji Mizoguchi . ….
On August 3, 1970, about a year and a half after the fact, Performance, which promised the big screen debut of Mick Jagger, had its official premiere. Completed in 1968, the movie was shelved by a nervous studio spooked by its general decadence and envelope-pushing sex, drugs, and sadistic, fetishized violence—not to mention a disastrous…
It’s that time of year: every summer here at Mid Century Cinema we roll out a new Top 10 list . . . from fifty years ago. As always, our obligatory qualifiers apply: such exercises are silly, arbitrary, impossible, and irresistible. [Our legal department has also advised us to note that all lists appearing on…
We conclude our back-fill of best-of lists here with a review of 1968. To review our bucket-load of qualifications regarding the folly of such lists, please see our discussions of 1967 and 1969. Reviewing those entries ourselves, we note that although we come to praise the ten films below without reservation (and winnowing down from…
The staff in the mailroom here at Mid Century Cinema received some angry letters in the wake of our recent “Best of 1969” post—from 1967 and 1968. “Why didn’t we get the “best of” treatment?” they complained, in correspondence littered with passages too vitriolic to reprint here. Closing with more than a hint of snark,…
Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 17, 1969. The screenplay (co-written with Mazursky’s regular collaborator Larry Tucker) won top honors from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics; Quincy Jones did the music and veteran cinematographer…
“My romantic idea is to be part of an American New Wave,” Francis Ford Coppola told an interviewer in 1972, perhaps defensively in the wake of the monumental, mainstream success of The Godfather. And as if to prove the point, his next film would be the beyond-uncompromising New Hollywood masterpiece The Conversation (his price for…
It is very 1969 out there this summer, with anniversaries of touching the moon (that’s a Dylan reference) and the Woodstock Festival, as well as what one friend perfectly described as the “immersive experience” of the time capsule visit to EL-Lay ‘69 that is Quinten Tarantino’s current release. Naturally all this led us to thinking…
June 18, 1969 marked another milestone moment for the still-emerging New Hollywood, with the premiere of Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist western The Wild Bunch. It was something of a comeback for the veteran director, a hard-drinking ex-marine with an unpredictable, combative personality, who made a career of battling studio bosses (and alienated enough of them that…
Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates and starring Steve McQueen, premiered on October 17, 1968. A much beloved film that invariably brings a smile to the face of its enthusiasts—mostly for its legendary car chase. It lasts over ten minutes! Steve McQueen did much of his own dangerous high-speed driving! That streets-of-San-Francisco sequence (the big hills…